Despite “all the good reasons not to use” the term illegal immigrant, “it is still very easy to find in the US press, even in headlines,” Felix Salmon writes. He lists news orgs that make a point of not using it (AP, the Los Angeles Times, BuzzFeed), those that have an “It’s complicated” relationship with the term (The New York Times, Newsweek, Bloomberg News) and those that prefer it (The Wall Street Journal, Reuters).
Here are a couple more that eschew it:
- The San Francisco Chronicle stopped using it last May.
- The San Antonio Express-News stopped using it in 2008.
When AP stopped using the term, Executive Editor Kathleen Carroll told Poynter it was because “It’s kind of a lazy device that those of use who type for a living can become overly reliant on as a shortcut. It ends up pigeonholing people or creating long descriptive titles where you use some main event in someone’s life to become the modifier before their name.”
“No major publication has started using it again after a period where it was banned,” Salmon writes. “So although it’s pretty clear where the media is moving on this issue, it’s also evident that we have some way to go.”
